Various mechanisms exist for booting an operating system (OS) on a computing device. In devices having no disk, or hard drive storage, the OS files must be stored externally, and retrieved during launch of the OS. This type of diskless device may be called a “thin client.”
Current diskless client personal computer (PC) devices use network booting to enable diskless operation of the thin client. A minimal amount of data is stored locally on the thin client while the majority of the operating system (OS) boot files are stored remotely on a network accessible device (NAS). The thin client stores enough information in the network interface card (NIC) Option ROM (O-ROM) to start the network and begin fetching OS data, after which all local processing on the thin client is performed on remote data files; the thin client has no bulk storage. Due to the large sizes of modern OSes, for instance the Windows Vista® OS requires approximately 4 GB of data files to boot successfully, network boot performance is limited by network performance. On a 54 Mbit WLAN, network booting the Windows Vista® OS would require nearly 10 minutes of data transfer time (not counting the overhead of network processing). Users expect boot times on the order of seconds, not minutes. Therefore, a more efficient method for booting in a diskless environment is desired.